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First of all - apologies to all readers of this blog for the long time-lapse. Life has been difficult, and I was simply unable to keep going. But I hope this new post will be the first of many - perhaps one a month, not one a day like some manic bloggers! Why have almost none of us ever heard of Willem Linneg, Junior, and why do I say he was born out of his time? Of course, he lived through the very same days and years as anyone else born in 1842 who died in 1890. Not a long life - he died aged 48 - but a very productive one. A great many paintings, and  123 listed etchings, of which I have 4 to share with you. But Monet was born in 1840, Renoir in 1841, Pissarro in 1830. Does Willem Linnig, Junior, show any sign of having heard of any of these artists? No, he does not. He looks back - back to the Flemish Golden Age, and back to the French artists of the 18th-century. So no wonder he has fallen through the cracks of art history. Yet I am intrigued by his work, and hope you will be too.

In 1986 I edited, with my friend Victor E. Neuburg, a collection of Charles Dickens's social criticism, under the title A December Vision . One of the pleasures of that project was researching visual images to match Dickens's texts on London's workhouses, prisons, and ragged schools. Illustrators such as George Cruickshank, Phiz, Watts Phillips, W.G. Mason, Kenny Meadows, William M'Connell, A. Henning, and various Punch cartoonists, enlivened the pages, along with work by two French artists, Gustave Dor� and Gavarni. But I don't recall ever coming across the searing etchings of Auguste Lan�on, created around 1880 to accompany the text La Rue � Londres by his friend Jules Vall�s, published in 1884. It's a shame as many of them perfectly illustrate the scenes of poverty and desperation that so strongly roused Dickens's sense of injustice and inequality. Auguste Lan�on, Un abreuvoir dans Tottenham-Court-Road Etching, 1884 Auguste Lan�on, Une ruelle dans Spita

Th�ophile-Alexandre Steinlen (1859-1923) is celebrated for his posters for the Chat Noir nightclub, and his lithographs of languid ladies with cats. But he also had a strong social conscience, and in this post I want to look at his powerful images of working men, and in particular his lithographs for the novel Les Gueules Noires (The Miners, literally The Black Mouths or Black Faces) by Emile Morel. This novel is a kind of companion piece to the more famous Germinal by Steinlen's friend Emile Zola. It was published in 1907 by E. Sansot, with 16 lithographs by Steinlen printed by Eug�ne Vernan. The ordinary edition on wove paper has no limitation, though it is not common. In addition to this trade edition there were 25 copies on Japon Imp�rial and 5 copies on Chine; these numbered copies have the lithographs in two states, in black as in the regular edition and in sanguine. I have no. 10 of the 25 copies on Japon. Here are the paper wraps, in both states: Th�ophile-Alexandre Steinle

The etcher F�lix Bracquemond was a towering figure in nineteenth-century French printmaking, a fact which was recognised when in 1900 he won the Grand prix de gravure at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Over the course of a long career he worked in various styles, producing over 800 prints, but essentially he is one of those figures who form a bridge between the Barbizon School and the Impressionists, having close links with both groups. His discovery of the woodcuts of Hokusai in the late 1850s is often seen as the start of French Japonisme. Paul Rajon, Bracquemond (en 1868) Etching, 1897 F�lix Bracquemond was born Joseph Auguste Bracquemond in Paris in 1833. Brought up in a stable, he entertained youthful dreams of becoming a circus rider. Around 1848, he was instead apprenticed to a lithographer. Taking drawing lessons in the evenings, Bracquemond was noticed by Guichard, a former pupil of Ingres. He persuaded the boy's parents to let him leave his apprenticeship and become